CHRISTIE

Chris Christine gave a speech at CPAC last week and he got a standing O, and he is supposed to be the darling (again) of the Republican Party. I guess it's because the media frenzy to destroy him over the closing of the George Washington Bridge has gotten so absurd there is now a backlash. He is perhaps garnering some sympathy from the peanut gallery.

I have written about Christie before. The coverage of the “Bridgegate” scandal is ridiculous, of course, but there are a lot of other reasons to dislike him. He has embraced Obamacare, for example, and he seems way too comfortable with NJ's highly-restrictive gun laws. In addition, he seems to have no understanding of jihad or the Islamist campaign to impose sharia law in America. His appointment of Sohail Mohammed to the New Jersey bench, for which he was placed on CAIR's “best list” in 2013, is very troubling.

He's not a conservative, in other words, and I won't vote for him if he mounts a campaign for the White House in 2016, but I'm hoping it doesn't get that far. We've been there and we've done that, haven't we? In fact, it was only sixteen months ago.

Christie, like Romney, is a blue-state Republican from the Eastern Seaboard with questionable conservative credentials. These guys CANNOT WIN. The selling point is always the same: “He crosses the lines! Democrats like him! He got elected as a Republican in a heavily-Democratic state!” It sounds plausible until you think about for a minute or so, or until you look at the results from 2012. Then you realize. It's not enough to do better in the blue states, you have to win them. And they don't. They don't come close. Romney, for example, did much better against Obama in Massachusetts than McCain had. In 2012, Obama had to settle for only 60% of the Massachusetts popular vote.

With Christie, the story will be very much the same. Ask yourself this: in a presidential election, would Chris Christie carry New Jersey against Hillary?

OK, you may say, but every Republican is going to lose New Jersey to Hillary. And New York and California and Connecticut and Illinois and Massachusetts as well, so what's the difference if Christie winds up losing those states rather than, say, Ted Cruz?

And there's no difference, of course. New Jersey doesn't matter to Republicans, and neither does Massachusetts, at least not in a presidential election. That's why, when Romney and Christie and their supporters talk about how impressive it is to be a Republican governor in a blue state, they should be ignored. WE LEARNED THAT LESSON LAST TIME, DIDN'T WE???

For a Republican, being popular in a place like Texas or Utah or Mississippi matters a lot because that's where the money comes from, and the volunteers and the enthusiasm. All those assets can be parlayed into electoral juice that will actually turn the tide in the dozen or so states that can swing one way or the other---Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Colorado, Arizona. Romney never got the benefit of that enthusiasm and that juice, and Christie won't either. Chris Christie will never be loved, or even trusted, in the places that need to love you and trust you if you are a Republican and you want to be president.

Copyright2014MichaelKubacki